CNN reported Monday evening that it had incorrectly identified a man who appeared in a video report claiming to be a long-term prisoner of former President Bashar Al Assad’s regime.
In reality, the man is a former Syrian intelligence officer.
In a CNN story published last week, chief international correspondent Clarissa Ward and her crew were led by Syrian rebels to a Syrian Air Force headquarters in Damascus to search for Austin Tice, a missing American who they believed was there. a secret prison was held. . Instead, they discovered a locked cell where a man was hiding under a blanket.
The man identified himself as Adel Gharbal from Homs and claimed he had been in solitary confinement for three months. He seemed surprised and overwhelmed when he heard that the Assad regime had fallen. If the images were verifiable, they would have been astonishing.
However, reports presented online that the man may be lying about his identity. He appeared well-groomed and unharmed, and a website called Verify-Sy, which says it fact-checks stories about Syria, said it could find no such “Adel Gharbal.”
Verify-Sy reported that residents of a neighborhood called Al Bayyada in Homs had identified the man as Salama Mohammad Salama, or “Abu Hamza,” a first lieutenant in the Syrian Air Force intelligence service.
On Monday, CNN could to confirm that it was Salama.
“We can confirm the real identity of the man from our story last Wednesday as Salama Mohammed Salama,” Ward said posted on X Monday evening.
A resident of Al Bayyada provided CNN with a photo of the same man, who appeared to be on duty in a government office. CNN was able to use facial recognition software to find a more than 99 percent match to the man who appeared in their report.
Although Verify-Sy also said Salama was jailed for less than a month over a dispute over “sharing profits from extorted funds with a high-ranking officer,” CNN was unable to verify this claim.
Several residents have accused Salama of having a reputation for extortion and intimidation. More than a few journalists expressed outrage at CNN’s reporting.
“Amazing that she just dropped this as a further development of the story and not as an embarrassing piece of misinformation and bad reporting,” wrote Christin El-Kholy, editor for New Lines Magazine, in a post on X.
Journalist Tariq Kenney-Shawa criticized Ward’s response. “No retraction, no apology. The style of journalism that journalists like Clarissa Ward practice is more about promoting themselves, their brand and emotional stories that they think will boost their ratings, than about reporting accurately and conscientiously,” he says. wrote.
And others were simply disturbed by how ridiculous it was to falsely portray the jailer as the prisoner. “You were played by a corrupt intelligence officer from a dead dictatorship,” said journalist Jacob Silverman wrote in a post on X, in response to Ward.
